Geographical IPv6 | IPv6 to location

IPv6 addresses

Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 has been developed to replace the current IPv4 addressing scheme, due to the limited number of IPv4 addresses available.

IPv4 was designed when the internet was first being developed, and only uses a four-octet address to distinguish hosts on a network. With the massive growth of the internet, the available address space of IPv4 soon became an obvious problem, and so Network Address Translation (NAT) and Port Address Translation (PAT) were developed, allowing a single external IP address to represent a large network of hosts on a Local Area Network (LAN) - NAT or PAT would then translate these internal and external addresses, reducing the load on the IPv4 public address space and increasing it's life span. With the continual growth of the internet since NAT and PAT were developed, IPv6 has been designed with a far larger address space in mind.

IPv6 address format

Where IPv4 used a 32-bit address, IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, providing an address space that supports 3.4×10³⁸ hosts. This would remove the need for NAT and PAT.

An IPv6 address would commonly be written as: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

Further reading

IPv6 to Location

Once IPv6 addresses are adopted throughout the wider internet, and across Internet Service Providers (ISPs), current IP to location services will have to update their databases, to track the locations of version 6 IP addresses. It is estimated that by 2011, the IPv4 address space will be exhausted, and the move to IPv6 will be accelerated.

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